IBM x3950 M2 Powerful ESX Machine

Posted on November 27th, 2008 in Data Center, Hardware, Virtualization | 2 Comments »

For a while ago, I had spoken to my team and friends about the amazing concept if we do able to use the HPC concept to scale our Server hardware in term of processors, memory and I/O without increasing the amount of ESX server in the Virtual Environment. I remember the question had been raised to the VMware representative and this is not in the road map for the ESX servers. 2 days back when I attended the seminar in town and I found this interesting server which is IBM X3950 M2 had been presented with the capabilities I had been looked around. Some of my friend may think the idea of doing this is crazy or over limit, but in real scenario, you will realize the benefits in term of managing and scaling from time to time when you managing a real huge environment with a massive amount of Virtual Machines.

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Revise IT strategy on Economy Crisis

Posted on October 16th, 2008 in Data Center, Industry News, Operating Systems | No Comments »

Economy crisis is already happened and impacted to every business around the world. The major impact are really hit to the banking and financial environment. At the same time, I believe that the financial sector are the highest IT spending every year and everywhere around the world to provide service availability to their customer, stock market, and treasury trading.

If we analyze what happen to the IT spending on the financial and banking environment, you will not surprise to see that the amount of storage, servers, solution and unnecessary equipment been under utilized for every bank around the world. The IT department for financial sector had been comfort live for many years and is time now for them to review and revise their IT spending to ensure higher return from their investment.

Open source or reliable LINUX had not been really high utilize in financial sector are really due to the comfort living of their IT department. Personal point of view, why we have to run something else on the expensive IBM AIX, mainframe, HP UX, Microsoft, Oracle VS the reliable LINUX from x86 or x64 platform to perform the same result? The simple answer is really the mindset from the person.
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Why VMware Regional Office for Asia South not in Malaysia?

Posted on October 9th, 2008 in Industry News | 2 Comments »

VMware had setup their regional Asia South office in Singapore quite some times ago. Personally, I am wondering should this be the correct decision to be based in Singapore which is seems to be a higher cost sustain area, and the IT market in that area are just not focusing enough compare to Malaysia. The reason of saying this, is not because myself is a Malaysian.

1 of the good example, IBM had ship their regional office to Malaysia from Singapore previously, because they saw the potential market grow in this country as well as more talent source in Malaysia for IT related area. Many of the IT giant are setup the IT hub, data center as well as corporate office in Malaysia to enjoy the TAX free holiday as well as cheaper real estate cost and man power resources. There are HP, IBM, DELL, SHELL, EDS, HSBC, Prudential and etc around in Malaysia. Guess what, most of them are even having their production data center in Malaysia itself.

Now we go back to VMware, virtualization is growing in Malaysia, but the present from VMware are more relay on the partner in here. Training are not provided as what been provided in Sinagpore or Australia. Most of the time, even in singapore training center, the attendees are not Singaporean. As economy crisis now, to attend a training in Singapore will be 3 times more expensive for someone who attending a training in Malaysia. If I not mistaken, they have less than 10 employees in malaysia for VMware itself. It just not big enough to attract the confident of the potential giant customer from Malaysia market if you do not present yourself strong enough as your competitor.

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Efficient Data Center - Virtualize & Consolidation

Posted on August 26th, 2008 in Data Center, Industry News, Virtualization | No Comments »

As many of us may know that there are some article talk about the High Efficiency Data Center. I would like to talk about 1 of the major point here which is Virtualize & Consolidation, since our site is more focus on Virtualization.

High Gas/Petrol price become an global issues, no matter which region or which country are you from, this had become and issue which drive the Operational Cost for a Data Center to keep alive from daily basis. In Malaysia, the goverment had recently increase the commercial eletricity for 26 %. Imagine that if you DC consume RM 30000.00 a mount from power perspective, you had to pay RM 37800.00 a month. that had been significant impact the entire IT budgets plus the operational cost. As IT always be the main driver for most business today, we may need to provide a highly efficient Data center solution which able to recover the ROI within the shortest period as possible. Virtualization & Consolidation had come to the point for this.

As if we compare the power consumption from major chip maker like AMD and Intel, the watts per processor had stack and remain the same for the last 3 generations at least. The only improvement they made was really the perfomance per watt. 6 cores and 8 cores had been down the road, I will be strongly encourage who had not adapt to virtualization need to start virtualize or prepare to virtualize 80% of thier production environment.

My environment currently had running the entire DR solution with VMware technology. In production, I do have more than 50 production VM which provide web hosting, middleware, file & print servers and etc. Imagine you had a tight budget with only 50k USD, how many of physical servers will you able to buy from there? and wat about the amount of power you need to absorb on monthly basis? That is the real cost as many of you may had not see the electric bill. For my case, my cost center had to paid for the power bill ourselve.
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